A Crooked Broker Society: The Mainstream Media as Pimps and Panderers

As the chart above shows, the world’s affluent nations are becoming (and North American nations have already become) Crooked Broker Societies. The rich and powerful no longer get their hands dirty actually doing anything of value. They merely use their money and power to intermediate between desperate vendors and weak, addicted buyers. And as James Surowiecki has pointed out, they’re not ‘honest brokers’ either, balancing the interests of vendor and buyer and mediating for a reasonable fee. They have divided up the brokerage role into two parts: an exploiter role, designed to subjugate and oppress the desperate supplier, and a procurer role, designed to pander to and gouge the weak buyer. The exploiters and procurers then collude (and sometimes merge to play both roles), paying the supplier next to nothing and charging the buyer a huge amount for worthless crap. The chart above shows how these roles siphon wealth from both suppliers and buyers, providing nothing of value in return, in just about every sector of our modern society.

You see this in struggling nations, and in areas like North America’s inner cities, where poverty, desperation and lawlessness are endemic. The fact that this same tawdry oppression of suppliers and gouging of purchasers is now occurring everywhere attests to the dysfunction of our political, social and economic systems, and the growing sense of market anarchy, where any behaviour is justified if it is profitable, and where the ends always justify the means. It is evidence of a culture in the terminal stages of decline and disintegration.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the mainstream ‘information’ media. This should probably not be surprising, when these media are owned by a corporatist oligopoly that measures success by profit, not by the quantity or quality of information it delivers. For the past week we have been subjected to the sorry spectacle of these media fawning over a single deranged man who set them up with the video and audio and the violence they needed to justify lazily and irresponsibly passing this off as somehow newsworthy. They were able to play this up for a week and it cost them essentially nothing. The consequence was to stir up enough hysteria to sell a lot of newspapers and attract enough bored ambulance-chasers to make the entire undertaking enormously profitable.

The conservative politicians and corporatists loved it, too — it took attention away from rampant political and business corruption and incompetence, and allowed fear-mongers to advocate more crime laws, conservatives and preachers to lament the decline of moral values in our society, and propagandists of every stripe to exploit the event for the media circus it was. The message for publicity-hounds was clear: If you’re desperate to get a lot of global publicity in a hurry, make sure to (a) kill a lot of people, (b) do it in an affluent nation, (c) do it in a spectacularly gruesome way, and (d) pre-create and edit your own audio and video for the media so they can’t screw your message up. Whether or not it means anything, or there is any lesson to be learned from it, is irrelevant.

In the meantime, between the propagandists, the media conglomerates and the advertisers, lots of profits were made and lots of political points were scored, and the citizenry was left as dumb as ever. Even more dumbed down, in fact, because of all the events that received little or no coverage while the mainstream media gleefully and rabidly pimped for a suicidal loser, political interest groups exploited the ‘event’ by misinforming the public about its ‘meaning’ (with no challenge whatever from the reporters), and shareholders and advertisers raked in the extra dough the publicity generated.

It was a shameful, disgraceful performance but it’s one we are getting terribly used to from exploiters and procurers in every aspect of our lives. Whether it is the misogyny, sleazy product marketing and violence-promotion of rap videos, or the willful broadcasting of blatant corporatist lies in ‘advertising’, or the abrogation of responsibility for investigative journalism (and the ignoring of citizens’ whistle-blowing and investigation, lest it offend advertisers), or the obsession with the crime blotter while crises facing our world remain ignored because they’re too complex or too expensive to work on, the mainstream ‘information’ media show themselves to be nothing more than pimps and panderers, wasting our time and public bandwidth. Fiddling with sensationalist minutiae while the world burns.

We need to liberate hard-working producers and beleaguered customers from the bullying freeloaders and corporate-welfare bums in the middle two columns of the chart above, fat, lazy, overpaid, greedy, obscenely powerful do-nothing middlemen all of them. Let’s start throwing out the crooked brokers who stand between us and reasonably-priced, socially and environmentally responsible, quality products and services and important, actionable information. Let’s peer-to-peer them all out ofbusiness.

/rant